Avaya going public again

Avaya is going public again. The scion of AT&T and Lucent Technologies, was a public comapny once before. Back in 2007 private equity firm Silver Light Partners bought it out and took it private.  Now it’s looking to take Avaya public again with a $1 billion IPO of about 20% of the company.

You may think of Avaya as a telephony and unified communications vendor, but it has a significant share of the enterprise networking market since acquiring bankrupt Nortel’s enterprise business for $900 million. With that deal, Avaya gained telecommunications market share and inherited a modest enterprise networking business. And Avaya is definitely making a go of it with that networking business.

So what to make of this IPO? In a press release, Avaya said it would use the money raised in the IPO to pay down long-term debt, among other things. Silver Lake Partners certainly isn’t desperate for liquid capital. It just made billions by selling Skype to Microsoft. It never hurts a successful vendor to unload some debt, so I’d say this is a good thing.